Camel Crossings Without the Camels

Yesterday, Mickey drove us out to the Joe Alon Bedouin Museum, past Beer Sheva, through desolate stretches of roadwork. Every once in a while, we would get a glimpse of  Arab settlements and farmland.
This was my first look at the way the other half lives here.
The Bedouin museum revealed the lack of interest and respect for that culture among the general populace, or so it seemed to me. There were dusty dioramas of bedraggled men and women, their tents, their cooking utensils, amulets, etc. A smattering of English language signage offered tidbits of information, such as the fact that the Bedouins view the sea as an angel.
That rings true to me. The sea after all is fearsome and unpredictable, seemingly all-powerful to small human beings huddled in the bottom of a boat or on the shore, about to be inundated by the waves. One can certainly see in its rising surf the arch of an angel's wing.
There was an art museum, but it contained only work by Israeli Jewish artists. Though that work was interesting in itself, I wondered at the missed opportunities here. Why doesn't the museum offer residencies to the local Arab musicians, artists, and poets, who might entertain guests and disseminate their own work to the public?
If such offers have ever been tendered, they were apparently not embraced. I guess I understand why. To display one's art is to lay one's self open to observation, to become vulnerable. Art is not very compatible with fear, particularly the fear that making oneself conspicuous will bring only trouble.
In the U.S., we have Asian American, Latino, and African-American museums, flourishing institutions where people can display their proud and tragic pasts to the rest of us.
This did not seem to be that sort of institution. It was a thing conceived by Jews for Jews, a sort of Disney-fied version of Bedouin life, perhaps a way to remind them of a past that had been superseded in the movement toward modernity and  scientific progress.
There is no room in this new world for that old one, just in the dusty corridors of a museum.
My appetite whetted by the "camel crossing" signs I saw along the road to the museum, I asked the attendant whether one might find a camel in residence, and was told that there used to be one, but it had been stolen.
Yet on our way out of the museum, in a part of the compound closed to the public, I spied the knobby knees of a kneeling camel resting quietly in the grass.